Why is my domain resolving to the wrong IP when I do a DNS lookup or ping?

Cloudflare will mask your IP, this is because we use our own DNS to resolve to one of our many reverse proxy servers for any record that is "Orange Clouded," this does several things:

Protect your origin server

The IPs that you see are distributed globally across all of our PoPs with anycast networking. Since DDoS attacks are "Distributed" globally, we are able to spread the load across our entire network, while filtering the bad traffic.

The attackers will resolve to a Cloudflare IP address and not yours so they would not be able to attack your web server directly.

Speeds up your site

All of our PoPs are running a reverse proxy. These reverse proxies will improve the data your server sends to speed up your site. We use different methods of caching, compression, and removing of unwanted empty space (Auto-minify.) All of these features can be turned on and off from the various settings through the control panel or pagerules.